Hi Patrick,

Thank you for reaching out. I understand why the search results for "5 star hotel" could be confusing.

This happens because of how Google's search functionality works. When you enter "5 star hotel," Google treats it as a descriptive search term rather than a strict filter. It then provides results that it algorithmically determines are a good match for that description, which may include hotels that are not officially rated as 5-star.

For more accurate results, the best approach is to use the dedicated rating filter. Simply search for "hotel" and then apply the "5-star" filter from the rating options. This will show you hotels with a top user rating on Google.

Please note that Google's star ratings are based on user reviews, not on official, certified hotel rating systems. Currently, filtering by those official classifications is not a feature available through Google Maps.

I hope this explanation helps clarify how the search works. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Hi Alexander,

thanks a lot for helping me with this issue as well.

What I do not understand is why it is not possible to pull the data based on the google attribute "stars rating" which is part of the maps dataset?

Not all hotels have that of course but it could pull at least the ones with that data point existing.

And again, even if I search via URL where there are 30 5*hotels in the results list, the crawler returned only 5. This makes very little to no sense to me. I'd appreciate if you could clarify this for me.

Hi Patrick, thanks for understanding.

I will talk with the team, if there is any possibility to have a filter based on place description.

You are now talking about URLs list, can you please share that run so I can have a look at it? Thanks!

Hi Alex,

that would be awesome, thanks a ton. Here is the URL I used for the hotel searches: https://www.google.com/maps/search/5+sterne+hotels+bayern/@50.1402956,9.0608497,7z/data=!4m4!2m3!5m1!3e4!6e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDcyMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

When I crawled a longer list of hotels a while back, there were also a web designer, a strategy consultancy company and several restaurants included. :-)

Thanks again for looking into this for me, much appreciated.

Yeah, no worries!:)

Hmm, that's weird. Is it possible that you could find the actual run? From the list, it's hard to debug where the other unwanted places came from. Thanks, Patrick!

Hi Alex,

here is the link to the actual run. https://console.apify.com/view/runs/OteHlAbfKcrV7STPk Maps link: " https://www.google.com/maps/search/5+sterne+hotels+bayern/@50.1930517,9.0609806,6.96z/data=!4m4!2m3!5m1!3e4!6e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDcyMS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D "

In google maps, this loads many more if not all results in this specific location as there are less than 120 5* hotels in Munich. Does that help?

Thanks again for looking into this.

Hey Patrick, sorry for the wait, but it took some time debugging it.

It seems that when using the Satellite view (layer), it gives the URL with different zoom levels, and therefore, the Actor doesn't respond well to it.

Please use the Map layer view, I tried it and it works great. Thanks for your patience!

Hi Alex, no worries at all.

Not sure if really the view is the reason as all my searches open in map view and not satellite on my Mac. What I realised is that when using the search url I copied from google maps and paste it in a new tab, only the five hotels that were actually scraped show up. Really weird. I need to click the magnifying glass again to refresh the search in order for google to list more and then all results. This strange behavior might have led to only 5 results being scraped.

Does that make sense?

Hi Alex,

I checked with GPT and the url seems to be the issue.

Why Only 5 Results Show Up?

Google Maps doesn’t immediately load all results for a wide region when you open a direct search link.

The @lat,long,zoom setting constrains the visible area, and Maps only preloads a handful of “top matches”.

Clicking the magnifying glass re-runs the search for the entire visible map area, fetching all matching locations.

This behavior is by design to save bandwidth.

4. How to Fix? (Show All Results on First Load)

Remove the @lat,long,zoom part:

So I tried it again with the same search parameter but a shorter link without the long/lat parameters and it worked very well, see the run here: https://console.apify.com/view/runs/AMb19DJdAWUZ458M1

This seem to have solved it.

What do you think?